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I. INTRODUCTION
The phrase "civil rights movement" evokes the powerful words and images of the mass movement by Black Americans in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. In recent years, however, Asian Americans have increasingly laid claim to a place in the history of the struggle for civil rights. Just as Derrick Bell harkens back to Dred Scott v. Sanford1 as the first of the "leading cases" in civil rights,2 Hyung-Chan Kim's anthology of Asian-American civil rights cases and essays recalls cases such as Yick Wo v. Hopkin3 as proof of Asian Americans' longstanding participation in the development of civil rights law in the United States.4
When tensions within American multicultural, multiracial society exploded in Los Angeles in 1992, not only history but immediate reality itself seemed to insist on the inclusion of Asian Americans within the larger discourse on civil rights. Because what began as an arguably Black (Rodney King)-White (LAPD officers) conflict transformed into multiracial strife involving not only Black and White Americans but also Latinos and Asian Americans, the riots brought into sharp relief the complex racial interrelationships within Los Angeles. As a result, two race scholars announced that the riots "marked the beginning of a new period of U.S. racial politics," 5 one that must "decisively break with the bipolar model of race." 6 Since then, the black/white paradigm has been a subject of increasing academic debate; the controversy has likely entered the popular consciousness as well, due to the highly publicized conflict between Angela Oh and John Hope Franklin within President Clinton's race relations commission.'7
Although existing legal scholarship on the black/white paradigm generally assumes the paradigm to be a biracial model of racism that focuses exclusively on the relationship between Black and White Americans,8 an explicit definition is rare and difficult to find.9 The dearth of legal scholarship that endeavors to outline the contours of the black/white paradigm is problematic not only because the inadequacy of the paradigm is an often unexplored and unchallenged assumption, but also because the assumption may be incorrect or misleading.
This Note focuses on the (uneasy) relationship between the black/white paradigm and the Asian-American civil rights agenda. My primary project is to intervene in the seemingly unproblematic discussion of the black/white paradigm...